J. E. Franklin (born August 10, 1937), who publishes under the name J. e. Franklin, is an American playwright, best known for her play Black Girl, which was broadcast on public television in 1969, staged Off-Broadway in 1971, and made into a 1972 feature film of the same name . She has written and adapted plays for television, theater, and film.
Early life She was born Jennie Elizabeth Franklin in Houston, Texas, to Robert Franklin and Mathie Randle. She was the eleventh of thirteen children. Her father was a cook who operated the family's store and her mother worked as a maid in the homes of wealthy white families. Due to the alternating work and sleep schedules of her parents, there were strict rules about not making noise at home. She adapted a signal system of her mother's ("used whenever a stranger was around and she did not want to admonish us publicly") to create one that was only understood by herself and her brother, so that they could communicate and noiselessly through "an elaborate system of facial expressions and body language." Once, on a bus, she and her brother were thought to be deaf-mutes. She was also an excellent mimic of sounds. "When she visited her grandparents [her maternal grandfather had remarried], who lived in the country [she called it "Grandpa's Country"], she could mimic the clucking of their chickens so accurately that her grandparents thought that the birds themselves were present." For a time there were six children in one bed at home, as the family rented out their house and lived in the store. Later, she worked alongside her mother, making beds, ironing, and peeling potatoes. "I was a domestic worker," she recalled. While doing domestic work she witnessed disrespectful words hurled at white women from their own family members.
After she learned how to write at school, she collected pencils and tablets of paper to write on. "As a young writer, I soon learned how to scan the school yard, streets, and trails children traveled on their way to and from school for the pencils or pens I could find. I wrote everything on the front and back of each page. Paperbags, napkins, and inside of boxes after the foodstuffs had been eaten – all existed for my use. And, even today, I can barely check the impulse to pick up lost pens and pencils when I see them lying around. Poverty has a way of making one form habits." Her mother brought her cast-off books to read from the "white peoples' houses where she worked. They were filled with stories of talking pigs, fiddling cats, thrifty hens, and a host of other beings... One story, Cinderella, introduced me to the themes of the missing parent, the stepparent, and the siblings who were not whole sisters or brothers." She said that Cinderella was an influence on her play Black Girl, and that the play was not autobiographical.
New York Franklin attended the University of Texas at Austin, graduating in 1964 with a B.A. degree in Languages. (Her play, Throw Thunder At This House, was about the first Black undergraduate to attend UT, and was performed at Skidmore College in 1979). She moved to New York City, and lived in an apartment near the Judson Memorial Church, which housed the famous Judson Poet's Theatre. At college she had taken courses on short-story writing, but she developed an interest in theater after witnessing Barbara Ann Teer and James Anderson perform live on stage in Rosalyn Drexler's Obie Award-winning one-act musical Home Movies in 1964 at the Judson Poet's Theatre, in the Church's main Meeting Room. It was the first time Franklin had seen Black actors live on a professional stage.
Freedom School Franklin felt that her "roots were dying" and decided to return to the South. She was asked by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to work with Fannie Lou Hamer to help the voter registration drive as part of Freedom Summer. She taught the children of share-croppers at one of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party's Freedom Schools in Harmony, Mississippi. She taught the children under the trees, since they were driven out of every building they tried to use. She taught the children how to read by getting them to speak and write down their words and matching the words to what they said. She helped to create the Sharon Waite Community Center in Harmony, which was the project of Winson Hudson. This community center functioned as a haven for poor Black residents to gather and discuss their concerns and celebrate the spirit of their community. While in there, Franklin was moved to write her first play with the help of her young students, A First Step to Freedom (1964). She had been sent an old typewriter and a mimeograph machine. She printed out copies of the play, which the students held in their hands and used as their reading material (it included lines they had contributed). It was performed by the children at the community center. For many in the audience, it was the first play they had seen. As she has said: "I... had taken a number of courses in college about how to write a short story. It is for this reason, I believe, that I can only write one with much sweat and strain. I took no such course in playwriting, and so I have been on my own to move with freedom and facility as the properties of the stage allow." Franklin's play Freedom Rider (published in 2013) is about a voter registration field-worker, Clarissa, assigned to Harmony, Mississippi during Freedom Summer.
Playwright With the closing of the Freedom Schools, Franklin returned to New York. She served as a youth director at the Neighborhood House in Buffalo, from 1964 to 1965. On the advice of her agent, Jim Bohan, Franklin sent her work out to theaters using just her initials, J.e., and not her name, Jennie Elizabeth, because "They didn't want women. If you talk to white women and Asian women who are playwrights, they'll tell you the same thing. They didn't want them either. So there was a gender thing." She made the "e" for Elizabeth a lower-case "e", and wrote her name "J.e. Franklin", "Because if I put a big 'E' then they'd figure, 'Okay, this is a man.' If I put the little 'e,' there's, 'Hmm, I wonder?' Good. Keep wondering. I like that. Let 'em wonder."
In 1966, she wrote the play Two Flowers, which was produced by the New Feminist Theatre. She also wrote the first version of her play, Mau Mau Room, in 1966. Her next play was the children's rock opera The In-Crowd: Rock Opera in One Act. It was produced by Woodie King Jr.. He was the Cultural Arts Director for the Mobilization of Youth (MOY) from 1965 to 1970. MOY was a social service agency designed to provide instruction, job training, counseling, and mental health services for delinquent youth on the Lower East Side. King collaborated on the music and dance. The In-Crowd played at the International Youth Festival in the Youth Pavilion at the Montreal Expo in 1967, which Franklin attended.
From 1967 to 1968 she worked as an analyst at the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity in Washington, D.C. Franklin first heard the term "institutional white racism" from the Kerner Commission in 1968. While in D.C., she volunteered in the soup kitchens of the Black Panther Party. She also she met Alice Childress, from Howard University. "She was the first Black woman playwright I met. We had a long conversation on our train ride back to New York." Franklin moved back to New York and joined the Harlem Writers Guild, which had been founded by John Oliver Killens, Rosa Guy, John Henrik Clarke, Willard Moore, and Walter Christmas as a response to the exclusion they had experienced from the white literary world of New York. She joined so that she could "learn how to talk like a writer [and] get help [with her] work." There she interacted with Maya Angelou, Alice Childress, and Rosa Guy.
In 1969, Franklin's play Mau Mau Room was picked Douglas Turner Ward for Ward and Robert Hooks's Negro Ensemble Company Workshop Festival at St. Mark's Playhouse. It was directed by Shauneille Perry, who later (at Franklin's request) directed her plays Black Girl and Prodigal Sister. According to Franklin, the cast of Mau May Room included Richard Roundtree as "Jimmy" in the play. The title of the play comes from "Mau Mau", the name of the army of Kikuyu insurgents who led a rebellion against British colonial rule in Kenya. Franklin later changed the title of the play at the behest of her agent (it was eventually called Miss Honey's Young'uns (1994)).
Black Girl (The Teleplay) It was because of her participation in the Harlem Writers Guild that Franklin had success with her play, Black Girl. She wrote the play following the publication of The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, commonly known as the Moynihan Report, in 1965, which linked Black poverty to Black matriarchy. She said later: "The family is not, in my view, of the Moynihanesque matriarchy, but more like the Ashanti matrilineal family wherein males are not inferior in status, but rather society consents to a relationship of heritage around its females." As she later told the story, in the winter of 1968: "I was a member of the [Harlem Writers] Guild and I was at a Guild meeting when a representative from the (public television station) WGBH, (Boston), came to the Guild looking for black writers to write something for the series that they were in the process of putting together [On Being Black]. It was right after Dr. King's assassination that door kind of cracked open. White America was wondering, "What's wrong with the Blacks? What did we do to them? Haven't we been good to them?" So this white man came to the Guild and said that they were looking for people to write something for the series and quite a few of us turned in treatments. Mine was the only one that was selected. My treatment turned out to be Black Girl. Based upon maybe three pages of dialogue and a little narration of what I said I was going to do. They bought it and they hired me to write it for WGBH. It was a video production. So that very first production and presentation of Black Girl was a video production that was broadcast on NET (National Educational Television)" in 1969.
WGBH launched its series of twenty plays – called On Being Black – in conjunction with Brown University. Two professors at Brown, Rhett S. Jones and George Houston Bass (founders of the Rites and Reason Theatre) were the consultants on the project. Bass was the associate producer and script editor of this series of original plays produced on WGBH-TV in 1968 and 1969 that aired nationally over the Public Broadcasting System. Franklin started writing the full play in 1968: "I wrote through Christmastime and New Year's and never even went outside until a full draft was completed." It was finished in 1969, but Bass complained that she had written a play for the stage, not for the camera, and it was too long (one hour and thirty minutes) for the time slot for television. She cut the teleplay script to fifty-seven and a half minutes including the one-minute "teaser" she had to write to introduce the television audience to the central conflict of the play. (The full-length original version was later published in To Break Every Yoke, 2013.)